1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a heating and cooling apparatus attached to a vacuum processing apparatus, and more particularly relates to a heating and cooling apparatus for a vacuum processing apparatus that forms a thin film on a large glass substrate.
2. Description of Related Art
Several different processes have been used to fabricate device structures by forming films of various types on substrates. These processes include heat treatment in which a substrate (also called a wafer) is heated, cooled, or annealed, besides sputtering and other such processes (hereinafter referred to as other processes). In particular, heat treatment involving heating and cooling takes more time than other processes, and if an attempt is made to perform the heating and cooling in a shorter time, this can lead to problems of substrate warpage or damage, and consequently throughput could not be raised any further.
In view of this, as disclosed in Japanese Patents 2,575,285 and 2,766,774, apparatus have been proposed in the past in which a heating chamber and a cooling chamber are each provided independently of other process chambers, and substrates that require heat treatment, such as heating or cooling, can be subjected to heating or cooling treatment in parallel while substrate processing is being performed in the other process chambers.
Meanwhile, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application 2000-119848 discloses a vacuum film formation apparatus in which the interior of one loading/unloading chamber (corresponds to a load-lock/unload-lock chamber) is partitioned into a loading section and an unloading section, a heating means is provided to the loading section, and a cooling means is provided to the unloading section.
However, with the prior art disclosed in Japanese Patents 2,575,285 and 2,766,774, the heating and cooling of the substrates are performed separately in chambers (vacuum processing chambers) that are independently provided. Consequently, while the batch processing of substrates is possible in these heating-only and cooling-only chambers, because they are independently provided, they make the apparatus bulkier, and the apparatus therefore takes up more installation space. Also, while the batch processing of substrates is indeed possible with these dedicated chambers, because the substrate processing temperature inside each chamber is controlled to the same predetermined temperature, only substrates subject to the same processing conditions can be treated in batches.
Also, when it is necessary to increase the number of chambers, the amount of installation space taken up also increases, and the apparatus itself consumes more power, and this is contrary to the need to make an apparatus more compact and energy-efficient.
With the loading and unloading sections disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-119848, only one substrate can be treated at a time in either chamber, and therefore only one substrate can be heated and one cooled (maximum total of two substrates) can be treated simultaneously in a single loading/unloading chamber, and batch processing, involving numerous substrates treated at the same time, cannot be performed in the heating and cooling treatments.